China Reports Major Oil And Gas Find At Record Depths
China National Petroleum Corporation has made an oil and gas discovery with reserves estimated at 900 million tons, Chinese media reported.
The discovery was made after six years of exploration work
in the Tarim Basin in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwestern China.
The geology of the formation is challenging, the report said, requiring
ultra-deep drilling, at a record 8,470 meters.
"We have grasped the geological rules of oil and gas
reservoirs," said the general manager of Tarim Oilfield Company, Yang
Xuewen. "In Fuman Oilfield, we have successively drilled 56 100-ton wells
and found a new oil reserve area of 1 billion tons (about 907 million tonnes).
This has been the largest discovery of oil exploration in the Tarim Basin in
the recent decade."
The Tarim Basin is the largest oil and gas deposit in China,
with discovered oil and gas reserves reaching 16 billion tons. Production of
hydrocarbons from the basin is seen at 2 million tons this year, up from 1.52
million tons last year.
China has abundant oil and gas reserves but tapping them is
often challenging due to geological reasons, which has so far prevented the
country from shrinking its overwhelming dependence on imported oil and gas. The
country depends on imports for about 70 percent of its oil needs and is on
track to overtake Japan as the world's largest importer of liquefied natural
gas this year.
China produced an estimated 3.87 million bpd of crude oil
last year, according to a Reuters report from December. That was a 1.6-percent
increase in 2019 despite the pandemic and despite China's crude buying spree
fuelled by historically low oil prices. This made the country one of the top
ten oil producers globally, but with demand much higher than that, it also
solidified its dependence on imported oil and gas.
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